Tag Archives | Service

The following is a sponsored (though unbiased) post: Cryo Performance Computing makes custom gaming PC’s and high performance desktop computers for a number of different users, including gamers, professionals, audio, video & multimedia creators, and home theater buffs.

Each computer that Cryo makes is specially designed to perform at the peak of its potential, and they utilize a number of different tools and techniques to reach that potential, including a process called blueprinting and “Cryo Boost”.

Blueprinting is when they design a system by looking at each of the components to make sure there is no ‘least common denominator’ holding everything else back. For instance, if you buy the top of the line video card, but your processor can’t handle it, then you’re not getting the full capability out of your video card. To prevent that from happening, Cryo “carefully selects individual components that [they] know will all compliment each other and work well together”.

Cryo Boost is a process that Cryo uses to go beyond just overclocking and performance tuning into a whole new and revolutionary way of designing, building and testing a PC. This “end-to-end lifecycle of innovative idea to end product” includes:

User requirement driven design

Reference to a huge knowledgebase of component experience

Experienced industry professionals

Disciplined and thorough testing and verification

Just-in-time building and fulfillment

Technology and delivery partners

Participation in Web 2.0, blogs and forums

Which results in:

30-50% better performance over any mainstream manufacturer

30% longer product lifecycle

Reduced obsolescence

Over-engineered key components

Personal and individual service

One thing to note is that Cryo is based in the UK, so you’ll need to take things like warranty and shipping into consideration before making your purchase (for instance, they do their pricing in Pounds) but considering the fact that they’ve been “architecting, designing and building PC technology hardware and software for over 20 years”, I don’t think you should have any problems with their products.

Plus, if you need even more convincing that they know their stuff, just check out their ‘Free Stuff’ area, where they’ve posted a number of technical articles, useful tools and useful links, as well as their ‘Cryo Benchmarks’, where they show off various performance reports that have been done on their system, including the Custom PC Benchmark record that they set with the Velox in December of 2008.

Claytorial is the claymation version of Common Craft, and their goal is to “help people understand complicated things”.

Their first demo is for a magazine called More2Girls, and it shows off what they’ve got in store, though I can’t wait to see what they can with a concept like the Google spider, which is currently in their upcoming section.

For now though, it’s a great start, and a good look at an area that I think we’ll see a lot of in the coming year. (Explanations for complex technologies and services in simple and easy to understand ways.)

Andy Baio from Waxy.org was intrigued by his initial experience with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and wanted to know more about the people that participate in the service, including what they look like, and how much it would cost for them to reveal their faces.

To make the process easy, he fired up the Mechanical Turk and added a simple task to the queue: Upload a photo of yourself holding a handwritten sign that says “I Turk for…”, filling out why you turk.

At $.05 per photo, there wasn’t much response, but at $.25, the responses started to come in, and by $.50, he had a decent sized sample.

The results? 30 people total – 20 men and 10 women, almost all of which were white and in their 20s and 30s. 21 turk for money, and the other 9 turk for fun or boredom.

Think your Twitter profile is popular enough that it should start making you money?

If so, then TwittAd is here to help.

The service is designed to match users who don’t mind a little product placement and website promotion on their Twitter profile with advertisers looking for a new way to reach eyeballs, and offers Twitter background images that include the sponsor’s logo and information.

Twitter backgrounds don’t include clickable links, so it’s a little bit of a disconnect between the ad and a typical ad measurement statistic like click through rates and page views, but with a lot of companies eager to start using the service to reach a new audience, I don’t think it’s going to be tough to sell the spaces.